Based around the column "Trevor's Travels" published each Sunday in the San Bernardino Sun, with some detours along the way.

Saturday, February 8, 2014

Right Track - War on Poverty

This week's Right Track comes from The Daily Reckoning. It was sent

﻿to me by my son, Michael. It's written by Bill Bonner and helps to explain things.

The Druid Hill area of Baltimore, where we lived for about 10 years, was the front lines in the War on Poverty. Few people had jobs. Instead, they just hung around. Idleness begat disorder. And trouble… In personal lives, family lives, and the life of the community.

People slept at all hours… and stayed up late at night partying. Children were poorly tended to, often out on the street in the middle of the night. The sidewalks were strewn with trash, and dangerous. Gunshots were frequent. Violent deaths were not uncommon. The red and blue lights of the gendarmes were never far away.

It had its charms. One of our neighbors had murdered another man in a drug dispute. He seemed like a nice fellow, at least as long as you didn’t get him too mad. He and a few others formed a kind of glee club, singing the Motown hits, until they passed out drunk.

They could get drunk every night because they didn’t have to get up to go to work in the morning. The work world imposes order. You have to get up in the morning. You have to get along with your co-workers. And you have to get the job done. Mother necessity is a powerful civilising force. Take her out of a community and the place goes to Hell.

Marriage, too, comes with civilising requirements. You have to get along with your spouse. You have to learn to live together. You have to take responsibility for other people… and cooperate to get the job done.

But there were almost no marriages and no jobs in Druid Hill. Why? The War on Poverty made them unnecessary. You didn’t need to have a job to support yourself. And you didn’t need to get married to support your children either. The feds would do it.

“In 1963, 6% of American children were born out of wedlock. Today the number stands at 41%. As benefits swelled, welfare increasingly served as a substitute for a bread-winning husband in the home. …Children raised by a single parent are three times as likely to end up in jail and 50% more likely to be poor as adults”.